Speedy Delivery, Alaska Style

When I was a kid, you never had to worry when you needed a speedy delivery. In Mister Rogers' Neighborhood Mr. McFeely showed up with the goods whenever there was a delivery to be made.

But now that I'm older, wiser, and ever so slightly more cynical, I have a suspicion that Mr. McFeely rarely delivered beyond the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. Oh, sure, he probably ventured as far as Westwood if the delivery was for Mayor Maggie, but I'll bet he had an extra delivery fee.

Well, after all these years, Mr. McFeely has met his match. I'm talking about Frontier Flying Service, an Alaskan airline, who provides free delivery services for Nome, Alaska's Airport Pizza. That's right. Absolutely free delivery for every village on Frontier's regular flight schedule.

So, when the village council in Savoonga, on St. Lawrence Island in the icy Bering Sea, wanted a special holiday treat for young families in the village. It ordered 50 pizzas, half topped with chicken and ranch dressing and the other half with Canadian bacon and pineapple. Presto! Free delivery.

And once an order for six reindeer sausage pizzas once came in from the Arctic Ocean town of Barrow, the northernmost community in the United States, 500 miles to the northeast. Presto! Free delivery! Well, probably not exactly "presto." That order probably got cold on the trip. Hopefully it came with some reheating directions. I was curious about this particular order, so I checked things out: Barrow is actually a larger town than Nome. It has its own pizza place called Arctic Pizza, located at 125 Upper Apayauk Street. Telephone: 907-852-4222. The reviews on the internet are good. So, if they were out of reindeer sausage you had to call all the way to Nome just because they have free delivery? Frontier may want to institute a 20 pizza minimum for deliveries to Barrow.